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AMD A10-7850K Kaveri: The Linux Introduction

01-14-2014, 09:00 AM

Phoronix: AMD A10-7850K Kaveri: The Linux Introduction

This morning AMD is releasing the first APUs in their Kaveri family, their most advanced APU ever with up to 12 compute cores and is a big push forward with their overall HSA architecture. We managed to get our hands on a Kaveri system with A10-7850K APU and in the days/weeks ahead there will be many Linux benchmarks looking at the next-generation AMD APU. Here's what Linux users need to know right now about AMD Kaveri APU Linux support.

What I don't get is how new chipsets / processors have support in the kernel often months in advance and will run out of the box on even outdated LTS Ubuntu releases or CentOS, but gpus (in general, Intel does this with their new stuff too, cutting it too close to the last minute) don't see drivers until usually after their release, especially Mesa ones, and definitely not in advance enough to guarantee even the latest Ubuntu / Suse / Fedora / etc releases work with them.

It is hard to pitch Linux to an average Joe if, knowing they have to install the OS manually anyway unless they go through system76, they also have to make sure the computer isn't "too new".

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Kaveri is cool and all, but I'm more interested in the driver. Hopefully a link surfaces in the near future for it

As always with AMD new hardware (in this case very good hardware especially A8 7600) lack of support, only have wait for privative drivers official release

And on opensource side, support can be take much time if Radeon HD6xxx (VLIW4 and before) have today good state on comatibility and performance and for stay in actual state take much time (developers have working in this driver minimum 2 years before AMD free more information than 2013) but with opensorce efforts maybe solve performance issues

if situation happend with VLIW4 hardware (much older hardware and more work on them), for GCN opensource support can have same level of mature of VLIW4 opensurce driver take minimum 1 or 2 years

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usually i am not that picky with article names... but shouldn't it be "Ubuntu introduction"? Just to be fair about Fedora, Arch, Gentoo, and the others...

The information shared in this article holds pretty much true amongst all Linux distributions.... Especially with Ubuntu 14.04 using Linux 3.13 + Mesa 10.0.1 (and then tested on Git) and still not working right there, so you'll be hard-pressed to find it working on something older in a stable release of any distro.

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I've seen some reviews. Kaveri (except OpenCL) is not that big step forward for APUs and in Linux there are (and will be) definitely problems with drivers. So for a Linux user 6800K is the best APU s/he can get.

Works good with latest FOSS drivers and usually the fglrx Ubuntu recommends is stable.